Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Update: CISA is now the law: OBAMA SIGNS SPENDING, TAX BILL THAT REPEALS OIL EXPORT BAN* * *Back
in 2014, civil liberties and privacy advocates were up in arms when the
government tried to quietly push through the Cybersecurity Information
Sharing Act, or CISA, a law which would allow federal agencies -
including the NSA - to share cybersecurity, and really any information
with private corporations "notwithstanding any other provision of law."
The most vocal complaint involved CISA’s information-sharing channel,
which was ostensibly created for responding quickly to hacks and
breaches, and which provided a loophole in privacy laws that enabled
intelligence and law enforcement surveillance without a warrant.Ironically,
in its earlier version, CISA had drawn the opposition of tech firms
including Apple, Twitter, Reddit, as well as the Business Software
Alliance, the Computer and Communications Industry Association and many
others including countless politicians and, most amusingly, the White
House itself.In April, a coalition of 55 civil
liberties groups and security experts signed onto an open letter
opposing it. In July, the Department of Homeland Security itself warned
that the bill could overwhelm the agency with data of “dubious value” at
the same time as it “sweep[s] away privacy protections.” Most notably,
the biggest aggregator of online private content, Facebook, vehemently
opposed the legislation however a month ago it was "surprisingly"
revealed that Zuckerberg had been quietly on the side of the NSA all
along as we reported in "Facebook Caught Secretly Lobbying For
Privacy-Destroying "Cyber-Security" Bill."Even Snowden chimed in:Following
the blitz response, the push to pass CISA was tabled following a White
House threat to veto similar legislation. Then, quietly, CISA reemerged
after the same White House mysteriously flip-flopped, expressed its
support for precisely the same bill in August.And then
the masks fell off, when it became obvious that not only are
corporations eager to pass CISA despite their previous outcry, but that
they have both the White House and Congress in their pocket.As
Wired reminds us, when the Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information
Sharing Act by a vote of 74 to 21 in October, privacy advocates were
again "aghast" that the key portions of the law were left intact which
they said make it more amenable to surveillance than actual security,
claiming that Congress has quietly stripped out "even more of its
remaining privacy protections.""They took a bad bill, and they made it worse," says Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute.But
while Congress was preparing a second assault on privacy, it needed a
Trojan Horse with which to enact the proposed legislation into law
without the public having the ability to reject it.It
found just that by attaching it to the Omnibus $1.1 trillion Spending
Bill, which passed the House early this morning, passed the Senate
moments ago and will be signed into law by the president in the coming
hours.This is how it happened, again courtesy of Wired:In
a late-night session of Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced a
new version of the “omnibus” bill, a massive piece of legislation that
deals with much of the federal government’s funding. It now includes a
version of CISA as well. Lumping CISA in with the omnibus bill further
reduces any chance for debate over its surveillance-friendly provisions,
or a White House veto.And the latest version actually chips away even
further at the remaining personal information protections that privacy
advocates had fought for in the version of the bill that passed the
Senate.It gets: it appears that while CISA was on
hiatus, US lawmakers - working under the direction of corporations adnt
the NSA - were seeking to weaponize the revised legislation, and as
Wired says, the latest version of the bill appended to the omnibus
legislation seems to exacerbate the problem of personal information
protections.It creates the ability for the president
to set up “portals” for agencies like the FBI and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, so that companies hand information
directly to law enforcement and intelligence agencies instead of to the
Department of Homeland Security. And it also changes when information
shared for cybersecurity reasons can be used for law enforcement
investigations. The earlier bill had only allowed that backchannel use
of the data for law enforcement in cases of “imminent threats,” while
the new bill requires just a “specific threat,” potentially allowing the
search of the data for any specific terms regardless of timeliness.Some,
like Senator Ron Wyden, spoke out out against the changes to the bill
in a press statement, writing they’d worsened a bill he already opposed
as a surveillance bill in the guise of cybersecurity protections.Senator Richard Burr, who had introduced the earlier version of bill, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment."Americans deserve policies that protect both their security and their liberty," he wrote. "This bill fails on both counts."Why
was the CISA included in the omnibus package, which just passed both
the House and the Senate? Because any "nay" votes - or an Obama - would
also threaten the entire budget of the federal government. In other
words, it was a question of either Americans keeping their privacy or
halting the funding of the US government, in effect bankrupting the
nation.And best of all, the rushed bill means there will be no debate.The
bottom line as OTI's Robyn Green said, "They’ve got this bill that’s
kicked around for years and had been too controversial to pass, so
they’ve seen an opportunity to push it through without debate. And
they’re taking that opportunity."The punchline: "They’re kind of pulling a Patriot Act."And
when Obama signs the $1.1 trillion Spending Bill in a few hours, as he
will, it will be official: the second Patriot Act will be the law, and
with it what little online privacy US citizens may enjoy, will be gone.http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-18/congress-just-passed-second-patriot-act-and-nobody-noticed-how-cisa-became-lawGEORGISM:Those
who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. When the time comes that
you have something to fear, you'll have no place to hide.Incremental fascism is hardly ever noticed and frequantly extolled by those it is to be applied too.